The S3 command-line tool is the most reliable way of interacting with Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (AWS S3). This article will guide you through setting it up and using it for common tasks.

Installing the tool

1. Open a terminal. On Mac OSX, the Terminal application can be found in Applications/Utilities.

2. Run the following commands:

   curl "https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-cli/awscli-bundle.zip" -o "awscli-bundle.zip" unzip awscli-bundle.zip ./awscli-bundle/install -b ~/bin/aws

3. To verify that the tool is properly installed, run the following command

   aws help

Configuring the tool

1. Follow the instructions in the AWS documentation under Quick Configuration. This will require you to input the access key ID and secret access key provided to you by DevOps.

Using the tool

Listing a directory:

• $ aws s3 ls s3://bucket-name/path/to/file PRE dir1/ PRE dir2/ 2015-01-01 10:10:10 1234 File1.zip 2015-01-02 11:11:11 7654321 File2.pdf

  This directory contains 4 things: 2 folders (named dir1 and dir2) and 2 files (File1.zip and File2.pdf). File1.zip was created on January 1, 2015 at 10:10:10 and is 1234 bytes large (roughly  kilobytes). File2.pdf was created on January 2, 2015 at 11:11:11 and is 7654321 bytes large (about 7 megabytes).

  Add the --human-readable flag to the end of your command to get more human-readable sizes. For example: $ aws s3 ls s3://bucket-name/path/to/file --human-readable PRE dir1/ PRE dir2/ 2015-01-01 10:10:10 1.2 KiB File1.zip 2015-01-02 11:11:11 7.3 MiB File2.pdf

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